For nearly 4 years, from April 1975 to January 1979, Angkar, the ‘organisation’, ruled Cambodia by fear. Perhaps up to a quarter of the population perished, of whom large numbers were summarily murdered, beaten, and deliberately starved. Terror, autarky, collectivisation, ethnic purity, forced mobilisation of the masses in state building, and deliberate isolation were the hallmarks of the new state. Despite controversy about the scale of the lethal violence due to the policies and practices of the regime, there is ample evidence to situate the form, sequence, and proximate causes of mass murder in Democratic Kampuchea (DK). Our thesis is that DK, realised by the secret state and opaque instrument of the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK) known as Angkar, set about the further and complete decivilisation of Cambodia via a rapid and deliberate process of disintegration of the old society. Brought into being by terror, the new one was to be a pure communist society. Civil war, and with it the domination of warrior values and the widespread performance of authorised murder, had been the prelude to DK, and these murderous habits came to be played out in the CPK's radical social transformation of Cambodia. The strategies and decivilising shocks administered to Cambodian society by Angkar overwhelmed customary restraints against violence. The reversion of the state to archaic barbarism has occurred throughout history, and Cambodia is a compelling modern-day example. In this chapter we focus on the types of violence that were perpetrated in this period and examine through a criminological lens the extraordinary scale of lethality that occurred.
The story of the Cambodian hemoclysm,Footnote 1 its causes and evolution, have been documented and accounted for by a sustained and critical scholarship. We draw on this literature to account for the extreme lethality of the DK regime led by the Communist Party of Kampuchea.Footnote 2 First, we briefly outline the scale of the violence during DK and then describe the phases, patterns, and surges of violence against different ‘classes’ of victims that occurred with the implementation of the DK's nation-building plans, and in doing so offer a sketch of the DK's short-lived attempt to create a communist utopia. Then we situate our criminological analysis in terms of the struggle to define megacrime and mass violence and the limitations of current criminological theories. Next, we outline the explanatory contribution of both macrolevel and microlevel criminological theories about the causes of extreme violence and how these aid us in understanding how individuals and the DK regime were able to implement terror and repeatedly perform acts of murder. We conclude by reexamining the likely causes of this catastrophic surge in mass violence and argue that although ample precursors of such violence are evident in Cambodia's history, the convergence of a multitude of adverse external and internal factors combined with the particular form of radical Maoist policies imbued with indigenous overconfidence produced a perfect storm of violence.
Accounts of the unfolding of the revolution help us both contextualise the extraordinary or exceptional ‘boom’ in homicide that occurred during DK and, in later chapters, the apparent rapid ‘bust’ or decline in homicide that seems to follow the pattern we have already seen in Cambodia's past. Using the term ‘boom’ to refer to the atrocities inflicted during the Cambodian terror is in fact absurdly inadequate as the scale of homicidal violence far exceeded anything before or after. The scale of homicide (including neglect of the necessities of life) was the result of a generalised practice of rule by terror and is to be measured in fractions of the population rather than in conventional rates per 100,000; indeed, it is estimated that, depending on estimation of fatalities and total population, between one fifth and one quarter of the population perished in a period of less than 4 years. Most scholars place the loss of life at about 1.7 million, although lower and higher estimates have been made. For example, an early estimate by Vickery (Reference Vickery1984) placed the death toll at 740,000, or about 10–12 per cent of the estimated population of approximately 7.1 million.Footnote 3 A thorough review by Kiernan (Reference Kiernan2008, pp. 456–62), based on an estimated population of 7.89 million in 1975, produced a death toll of 1,671,000, or 21 per cent of the population. Kiernan estimated that about 29 per cent of the ‘new’ people perished, with a higher proportion among the Chinese, and 16 per cent of the ‘base’ people, with a higher proportion among the Cham.Footnote 4 The proportion of the deaths that can be regarded as murderous (i.e. with the intention to kill)Footnote 5 was substantial, and Kiernan estimated that 800,000 were murdered. The Cambodian Documentation Centre (CDC) has identified 196 prisons and execution centres of varying size and significance and as many as 388 ‘genocide’ sites, containing 19,733 mass burials, across Cambodia related to the KR period (Dy, Reference Dy2007, p. 4). The numbers interned in all these sites are not known but vary considerably (as few as 4 victims to over 1,000) from site to site. Given the scale of homicide inflicted on the population, although varying by place and in intensity, an organised, systematic, and sustained effort of suppression by the regime was necessary. Estimates of fatalities are inevitably imprecise given the limited census data available to demographers but also because of the CPK's emphasis on secrecy and deception. In a 1978 speech, Brother Number Two Nuon Chea explained:
Secret work is fundamental in all that we do. For example, the elections of comrades to leading work are secret. The places where our leaders work are secret. We keep meeting times and places secret, and so on…Only through secrecy can we be masters of the situation and win victory over the enemy, who cannot find out who is who…We base everything on secrecy.
There was frequent resort to deception by the DK security apparatus in their rooting out of potential enemies. One example was the ruse of calling on any remaining Vietnamese (or any other class or ethnic groups) to assemble for repatriation to Vietnam or back to their home villages. When the trucks arrived to take them, they only drove a short distance to a killing field (Kiernan, Reference Kiernan2008). An apparent version of the Maoist tactic of ‘let a hundred flowers bloom’ was also commonplace in the frequent workers meetings and ‘struggle sessions’ involving self-criticism, which were required by Angkar. These demanding meetings were aptly described by Bizot (2000/Reference Bizot2004) throughout his imprisonment in a camp commanded by Duch (see below) during the civil war (see also Locard, Reference Locard2013; Picq, Reference Picq1989; Sikoeun, 2013). Those who ventured more than self-criticism were targeted for murder. Another method was blandishments and reassurance, often playing to the victim's hopes and desperation. The soothing talk, reminiscent of the ‘showers’ offered in Nazi concentration camps, was designed to subdue the victim and freeze resistance.Footnote 6 There was a notable use of crude means of execution, and stabbing and blunt force traumas were common. Participation in these forms of execution appeared to reinforce obedience and loyalty among the supervising militia, cadre, and CPK candidates. Elements of the Revolutionary Army of Kampuchea (RAK) had also become highly specialised execution squads.
Illustration 8.1 The killing fields
Illustration 8.2 The killing tree
Illustration 8.3 The killing tools storage shed sign
The murders and disappearances were often hidden and seldom made a public spectacle (exceptions appeared to be the massacre of some Cham and Vietnamese villages), yet everyone knew the likely fate of the victims. Survivors report instances of exemplary public punishments of individuals; however, these frequently cruel and lethal events did not proceed according to a systematic pattern. The very unpredictability of these murders increased their terror. In the well-documented case of S-21 prison, commanded by Comrade Duch,Footnote 7 which allegedly handled high-security cases of the Santebal (the internal security arm of the CPK) under the direct command of the Minister of Defence Son Sen and the CPK leadership, as many as 21,000 were murdered at the prison and nearby ‘killing field’, among them many children (see Chandler, Reference Chandler1999). The S-21 prison operation highlights the bureaucratisation of the terror but may have been exceptional in this respect, since its priority role was not the performance of executions but intelligence gathering, the production of confessional statements (required to implicate others), and reports for the consumption of senior leaders.
During the course of our work in Cambodia, we spoke with survivors and perpetrators of the DK hemoclysm. Our conversations with older Cambodians were sometimes punctuated by remarks about ‘Pol Pot time’ and the fear, hardships, and losses endured. Details were seldom offered, and events themselves often described as if they had occurred like a sudden storm or inexplicable disease, and recalled like a vivid nightmare. Explanations and reasons for the murderous extremes were elemental: Pol Pot people were very cruel, killed freely, and hated anyone connected with the towns, the bonzes, Vietnamese, the King or Lon Nol: they even killed their own cadres. These anecdotes reveal the all-pervasive fear and uncertainty Cambodians experienced as well as the variability in the experience of terror of both the ‘liberated base’ peasants and the deported city people. Although the latter suffered the worst extremes, much depended on where, when, and with whom they became ‘depositees’ or so-called new people. The nominal class that one belonged to (i.e. ‘old’, ‘candidate’, or ‘new’ people) was also crucial; all but poor peasants were at risk of being classed as enemies of the revolution. So, supporters of the old regime, feudalists (members of the royal family and high officials), capitalists, bourgeoisie, rich and middle peasants, and even urban workers were targets for elimination and exploitation along with teachers, monks, intellectuals, and professionals (Carney, Reference Carney and Jackson1989, p. 99).
The Cambodian bloodbath, or hemoclysm
The revolutionary violence of DK, described below, followed a pattern similar to other state murders or megacrimes undertaken with Bolshevik-inspired ideology and tactics, and it relied on the same methods of killing. The purges of traditional nationalists and orthodox communist elements of the revolutionary movement account for a substantial share of the deaths; however, the emphasis on racial purity (‘Khmerness’) and the particular conceptualisation of the class struggle, as primarily directed at the people of the cities and towns (urbanites) by the peasant classes, greatly amplified the death toll. Forms of violence included mass murders and selective killing by military forces and ‘shock troops’; mass deportation of whole classes, towns, and villages; forced marches; work brigades; temporary camps and concentration areas; deprivation of food and medical security; and special security (elimination) prisons.
There was an element of collusion between Angkar and base people against the city or new people and the ethnic Vietnamese. City people had been demonised and dehumanised as both an exploiting class and ‘white’ Khmer, that is, not pure Khmer. The degree to which Cambodia's masses directly participated in the murders and control of the new people varied, but this collusion was seldom realised by interpersonal violence of the Rwanda kind, where Hutu murdered their Tutsi neighbours (Kiernan, Reference Kiernan2007).Footnote 8 Although the collusion took the form of peasant or ‘subaltern revenge’, it was often directed and soon replaced by surges of revolutionary terror against base people and party members that arose from the precarious standing and utopian ambitions of DK throughout the 44 months it functioned. The CPK's fear of counterrevolution was apparent, and this determined the elimination of all putative rivals during the civil war and in the immediate months after the fall of the Lon Nol government.
We view DK as a weak state locked in war communism and unable to govern without recourse to terror while constantly facing an existential crisis from forces within and outside. The CPK ‘fell under the spell of the counter-espionage myth consuming itself’, and changed ‘from reduction of opposition by seduction and surgical violence, to threat, terror and coercion’ (Carney, Reference Carney and Jackson1989, p. 97).
The revolution
By 1972, most of Cambodia had fallen to anti–Lon Nol forces, and by late 1974 only the larger towns and cities remained in Republican hands. Under siege, Phnom Penh, Battambang, and Kampong Cham battled on precariously supplied aid and were dependent on US air strikes to keep the Khmer Rouge (KR) forces at bay. The civil war ended on 17 April 1975 with the capitulation of the wholly corrupt Khmer Republic and the capture of Phnom Penh by a united front, the Gouvernement Royal d'Union Nationale de Kampuchèa (GRUNK). Marshal Lon Nol had fled Phnom Penh a few days earlier on a US helicopter. The occupying Khmer Rouge–led forces, like an ancient conqueror, promptly and forcefully emptied the city of its population of nearly two million, including hospital patients and medical staff. Phnom Penh's population had been enlarged by hundreds of thousands of war refugees displaced by the devastating bombing and the severity of the fighting, and many were in no condition for the rigours of a forced march to precarious transit camps, villages, and communes. There, the new people would have to fend for themselves and grow the rice crops essential for survival, as Cambodia then faced an acute food shortage.Footnote 9 Those incapable or resistant were summarily executed or abandoned en route to their destinations, the open prisons of a rapidly implemented totalitarian authority. The exact death toll from the exodus is unknown but counted in the thousands. Kiernan (Reference Kiernan2008) estimated about 10,000 died on the march and the same number was killed in the city itself.Footnote 10 In addition, Quinn (Reference Quinn and Jackson1989) mentioned a deadly outbreak of cholera following the exodus that killed about 100,000 individuals. The march out of the cities enabled the initial screening of the deported population for class enemies (identified and often immediately executed). Throughout the countryside, the rounding up and execution of the old hierarchy and functionaries of the short-lived republic had started. The evacuation of the cities was the opening phase of ‘year zero’, the beginning of the formation of the state of Democratic Kampuchea and a radical transformation of Cambodian society in the image of its ‘original Khmer’Footnote 11 communist leaders.
The exodus of the city dwellers to the countryside was the first decisive act of the revolutionary leaders and signalled the eclipse of the loose united front of nationalist, monarchist, and communist of many stripes. In hindsight we can see that this was the pivotal moment when the pragmatic and moderate elements of the ‘liberation’ forces (nominally a coalition of forces under Sihanouk) and of the CPK (represented by some of the Eastern Zone commanders whose loyalty soon wavered) were deceived by the radical Maoist elements led by Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Son Sen, and Ta Mok.Footnote 12 The victors sought to realise a pure Khmer communist state through the supremacy of the CPK and its dictatorial inner circle headed by Pol Pot and Nuon Chea (Brothers Number One and Number Two). There was no room for moderation, pragmatism, or conventional Marxist-Leninist ideas;Footnote 13 history was to be made regardless of the material circumstances. There was only one path: the neomillenarian path of an idealised autarchic restored Khmer state as brilliant as the Angkor Empire and the most pure communist of all.
Building DK
The basic policies of DK were foreshadowed in the ‘liberated’ zones prior to the fall of the Republic and at first featured programmes of collectivisation and persuasion rather than murder and terror, although from 1973 forced collectivisation, purges, and atrocities were already occurring (Quinn, Reference Quinn and Jackson1989). On 20 May 1975, CPK leaders and thousands of military and civilian cadres from all over Cambodia attended a meeting to learn the Centre's plans and to implement them. The creation of an autarkic agrarian utopia based on collectivisation and, therefore, entailing the banning of money and private ownership and the closure of markets was one of the principal aims of the new state. Another aim was to modernise agriculture and industry and achieve ‘scientific socialism’. This required the need to screen (code for killing) for disloyalty among CPK cadres and the masses to ensure they remained pure. The Centre, in effect the CPK leaders, was to be the ultimate arbiter of revolutionary purity, and thus the process of centralisation began. Two classes were created: ‘full rights people’ from the base areas and ‘candidates’ or ‘depositees’ from among the new people.Footnote 14 According to sources cited by Kiernan (Reference Kiernan2008, pp. 55–8), in particular an aide to the Eastern Zone's 1st Division commander Chhouk, and Chea Sim, the eight-point plan announced by the party secretary Pol Pot and deputy secretary Nuon Chea was brutally simple:
Evacuate people from all towns (and this was to be permanent).
Abolish all markets.
Abolish republican currency (and do not issue revolutionary currency).
Defrock all Buddhist monks and put them to work in the rice field (this also meant the banning of festivals).
Execute all leaders of the Lon Nol regime, beginning with the top leaders.
Establish high-level agricultural cooperatives throughout the country (i.e. village-level collectivisation with communal eating; the latter being implemented a year later in 1976).
Expel the entire Vietnamese population.
Dispatch troops to the borders, particularly the Vietnamese border.
The sources also mentioned opposition to schools and hospitals and orders to close them. The list was not definitive, and lower-rank informants who heard about the plans via senior cadres simplified the plans to more basic orders to kill Lon Nol soldiers and monks, expel the Vietnamese, and ‘uproot spies root and branch’. The interpretation of these orders inevitably varied according to local circumstances. Many accounts by new people showed that the attitudes of local CPK cadres could mollify or worsen the impact of these orders. Some of the characteristics that may have mitigated the frequency of homicidal terror, such as checks and balances on the authority to execute people, literacy of the cadres, and the presence of a rudimentary tribunal (as required by the DK constitution), were mostly absent. The combination of the oral transmission of orders and the intense secrecy of the CPK also account for the increasing swiftness, the arbitrary and summary nature of the murders of officials of the former government and other class and ethnic enemies.
Constitution and law
The constitutionFootnote 15 of DK was promulgated on 5 January 1976 and based on CPK leadership meetings during May and December 1975. It abolished the monarchy, ended Buddhism as state religion, and established the appropriation by the state of all private property while forming a ruling proletariat of peasants, workers, and soldiers (Quinn, Reference Quinn1978). As stated in the preamble, the constitution purported to express the ‘fundamental desires of the people, workers, peasants, and other labourers as well as…the Kampuchean Revolutionary Army’, and it extolled the role of the ‘peasants, the lower middle peasantry, and other strata of labourers in the countryside and cities, who account for more than ninety-five per cent of the entire Kampuchean nation’ in the liberation of Cambodia and who could now hope for (but not realise as, for the most part, individuals were relegated to the role of worker-slaves serving the collective) ‘a national society informed by genuine happiness, equality, justice, and democracy without rich or poor and without exploiters or exploited, a society in which all live harmoniously in great national solidarity and join forces to do manual labour together and increase production for the construction and defence of the country’.
Article 1 set out DK's revolutionary credentials as a nonaligned democratic state ‘of the people, workers, peasants, and all other Kampuchean labourers’ where ‘all important general means of production are the collective property of the people's State and the common property of the people's collectives’ (article 2).Footnote 16 It is governed by ‘the collective principle in leadership and work’ (article 4) and ‘absolutely opposed to the corrupt, reactionary culture of the various oppressive classes and that of colonialism and imperialism in Kampuchea’ (article 3). Chapter 9 of the constitution outlined ‘The Rights and Duties of the Individual’, which required ‘the duty of all to defend and build the country together in accordance with individual ability and potential’ and guaranteed a living, equal rights for men and women, the prohibition of polygamy and ‘complete equality among all Kampuchean people’. Article 20 established the right to religious freedom but specified that ‘reactionary religions which are detrimental…are absolutely forbidden’. The description of ‘actions violating the laws of the people's State’ was short and vague: ‘dangerous activities in opposition to the people's State must be condemned to the highest degree. Other cases are subject to constructive re-education’ (article 10).Footnote 17 Although the Kampuchean People's Representative Assembly (with most seats allocated to peasants and the RAK) was created to make laws and appoint the executive and judges of the people's court, it never functioned, as most of its representatives soon perished in the purges that followed.
The phases of violence
Quinn (Reference Quinn and Jackson1989) described how Pol Pot, imbued with righteousness and uncanny military and political success, planned to remake Cambodian society and preserve the revolution through the systematic use of mass violence and terror as well as purges of the impure and achieve four aims: (1) breaking the ancient regime, (2) initiating social transformation, (3) protecting the revolution, and (4) defending it from outsiders. Table 8.1 summarises these four aims and their consequences. Each of these aims and their associated methods identified different targets for terror. The deliberate emptying of the cities led to mass deaths among deported urbanites, the identification and elimination of the former enemy from the top down led to countless executions, and the suppression of cultural workers and technical experts to both widespread starvation and execution. Vietnamese were murdered along with the thousand or so ‘Hanoi-trained Khmer’ and those perceived to be collaborators. The collectivisation of agriculture and imposition of communal living and the mobilisation of labour brigades combined with food ration discipline led to further starvation and ‘crimes against the state’.
Table 8.1 The four aims of the CPK and their consequences
| Aim | Actions | Consequences |
|---|---|---|
| 1. BREAKING THE SYSTEM | ||
| • Destroying social, political, economic, and cultural infrastructure of the old society | • April–September 1975: killing of old regime officials and army officers • Urban centres emptied; city dwellers enslaved; intellectual, professional, and religious classes eliminated • From September 1977: purges of remaining old enemies; from mid 1978, deportation of rebellious Eastern Zone base people |
• Disintegration • Decapitation (elimination of the old elites) • Anomie • Moral inversion • Strategic and subaltern revenge |
| 2. SOCIOECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION | ||
| • Implementing agrarian autarky for a great leap forward to a workers’ paradise | • Collectivisation of agriculture • Deportations to scale up collectives, mobile work brigades |
• Disintegration • Destruction of village and household production patterns • Famine and mass deaths |
• Forcing society into communist-inspired socioeconomic patterns • Instilling new collectivist values |
• Regimentation of village and commune life through forced communal eating and family separation • New ‘crimes’ against the state, such as keeping individual property, theft from the collective, failure to meet collective targets |
• Anomie • Flight-freeze behaviour • Moral inversion • Hyperconformity |
| 3. POLITICAL PROPHYLAXIS | ||
| • Eliminating revisionism and the risk of coup d’état | • Mid 1976 and mid 1978, two waves of executions of unreliable or soft party cadres and their families and associates • Purges of CPK in 1977 and replacement of old cadres with new cadres from another zone • Mass execution and deportation of rebellious Eastern Zone population from mid 1978 |
• Greater party and state centralisation • Many deaths of cadres and their ‘strings’ • Solidifying the dictatorship by the vanguard |
| 4. DEFENDING AGAINST EXTERNAL THREATS | ||
| • Eliminating threats posed by Vietnam and alleged Khmer collaborators | • Massacre of ethnic Vietnamese and other minorities in 1975; second wave targeting survivors in 1977 • Elimination of all Hanoi-trained cadres in 1975 • Military incursions into Vietnam and border massacres of villages |
• Militarisation • Mass surveillance and paranoia (real or imagined) • Constant mobilisation of the masses and deportations of entire suspect communes and districts • Retaliation by the Vietnamese in early 1978 • Widespread defections of anti–Pol Pot elements to Vietnam |
Breaking the old: decivilising
For the CPK, the rise of the new society necessitated the destruction of the old; therefore, in the months following the fall of Phnom Penh, senior officials, army officers, and noncommissioned officers (NCOs) of the former Republic were systematically murdered,Footnote 18 often en masse, in a policy of ‘war communism’ designed to smash all enemies and to break the old system. Belated efforts by the Centre in September 1975 to restrain the executions of surviving officials, professionals, and soldiers of the Republic (i.e. attempts to suppress subaltern massacres) were temporary, and such executions renewed in subsequent phases of violence. No seeds of counterrevolution were to be left and all challenges answered by death. The scale, thoroughness (ruthlessness), and timing of the executions of these groups varied from zone to zone with the most extant reported in the Southwest (under Ta Mok's clannish control) and Centre Zones. These areas were closely allied to the Pol Pot group and soon evolved into ‘model’ collectives, expelling all the new people and minority ethnic groups. The CPK cadres in these zones became the revolutionary vanguard, often replacing purged cadres from other zones.
The CPK, like other Bolshevik-inspired revolutionary organisations, was deeply hostile to religion; yet, the influence of BuddhismFootnote 19 was apparent in the transcendental purpose of the revolution and the ascetic, sect-like certainties of the vanguard, engaged in the epic and apocalypticFootnote 20 struggle for communism and who made real the cosmic fate that befell unbelievers. Nevertheless, the regime targeted monks and religious leaders as well as intellectuals and teachers. Like Mao, Pol Pot saw individualism as the basis for attachment to private property, and so a threat to communism. Eradication of individualism would allow the correct collective values to flourish, so from this perspective ‘it was necessary to kill the professional or well-educated persons, the wives of military officers and government officials and their children, as well as rich landholders and merchants. All of them possessed the ethical and philosophical heritage by which the individualist system operated’ (Quinn, Reference Quinn and Jackson1989, pp. 193–4). The ‘smashing’ of enemies become an all-consuming task; once external and class enemies were eliminated, it became necessary to find enemies from within. Provoked by fears of espionage, paranoia about Vietnamese hegemony, and the failure of agrarian ‘leap forwards’ (attributed to sabotage and low revolutionary spirit), lower-rank Lon Nol soldiers, teachers, monks, and then peasants with relatives from the old regime, and finally the disobedient even among the base people were eliminated. Within a year of April 17, purges of ‘soft’ party cadres (and their ‘strings’ of associates and family) had begun, and these would continue in growing intensity and absurdity until the mass deportations and purges of the Eastern Zone in 1978 when DK was completely at war with itself.
Preserving Khmer purity
In addition to class enemies, the non-Khmer Cham, the Vietnamese, the Khmer Viet Minh or Issaraks – the Khmer ‘who were Vietnamese at heart’ – and other ethnic minorities were targeted for elimination, and here the term of genocide as defined by the 1948 convention is overall appropriate. The loss of life among the Muslim Cham was estimated by Kiernan to be about a third (around 90,000 deaths of an estimated population of 250,000) of this minority; the forced consumption of pork, the banning of Cham language (as were all foreign languages), and the prohibition of religious practice were at first resisted by the tight-knit Cham communities with dire consequences. Even though a number of Cham villages had been classed as base people, they were ‘scattered’ and treated like new people, and the hostility of the CPK to their religious practices resulted in a high proportion of murders, including most of the religious leadership. According to Kiernan (Reference Kiernan2008), of 339 community leaders, only 45 survived.
Seen as an external threat, the entire resident population of ethnic Vietnamese of about 20,000 was massacred during the forced exodus to Vietnam in mid 1975. Later, from late 1977, the CPK began to murder ethnic Vietnamese spouses of Khmer and their children, the speaking of Vietnamese was banned, and those of mixed ethnic backgrounds were also targeted for murder. Another group that also fared badly were Kampuchea Krom (Khmer located in Vietnam who spoke Khmer with a distinctive accent), many of whom had resettled in Cambodia as a result of the Second Indochina War.
The ethnic Chinese population counted around 413,000 and their fate was also severe, with perhaps half perishing, mostly due to starvation rather than murder. The Chinese, whose merchant occupations and urban status placed them firmly as class enemies and new people, were highly vulnerable to the rigours of forced labour and food shortages. It has been speculated that DK's close alliance with China may have quelled deliberate murder of the Chinese en masse. Other minorities such as the small Thai, Lao, and Malay populations probably also fared badly, although the evidence about what happened is limited; nevertheless, whole communities disappeared.
The war on the people
The CPK's assault on customary life, especially the prohibition of home meals and the separation of parents from children, the relentless work quota, food shortages, and the loss of cherished festivals, was so drastic that even base people and ‘full rights’ people deeply resented Angkar and its cadre. The arbitrary form of the terror and its indiscriminate murder of significant leaders (moderates and extremists) combined with the reduction of subsistence proved fatal to support for DK.
The Center spearheaded its systematic assaults on peasant ties to land, family and religion with punishing search-and-destroy missions into the economic, personal and spiritual provinces of peasant life. But these areas were heavily contested, and required aggressive, indefinite state patrolling…Along with massacres that threatened peasant life itself, it was the CPK's attack on the family that alienated peasant supporters.
While food shortages occurred through 1975–6, the seizure of most of the 1976 rice paddy by the Centre and further relocations of new people created disastrous conditions in 1977 through to early 1978. Many survivors reported that young children, the old, the weak, and the frail began to perish in large numbers during the latter half of 1977. Some reported cases of cannibalism, similar to what happened during Mao's Great Leap Forward (Yang, Reference Yang2012). Rations of gruel and compulsory communal meals, combined with prohibitions on foraging, also led to the stealing of food, complaining, and other forms of resistance, which were frequently met with summary executions. Again, the intensity of the resistance and subsequent executions of those lacking revolutionary zeal varied from locality to locality (Beang & Cougill, Reference Beang and Cougill2006; Dy, Reference Dy2007; Kiernan, Reference Kiernan2008).
The creation of a totalitarian society of open prisons required the full weight of a weak state (i.e. without popular legitimacy) to enforce and maintain surveillance over its inhabitants, reducing them to ‘digging in, bending low and cursing inwardly’ (Frieson, Reference Frieson1992, cited in Kiernan, Reference Kiernan2008, p. 13). This ‘freeze’ alternative to the normal response to danger and fear – flight or fight – was the natural response of the new people, but in time it became more commonplace among base people, as peasant support waned when the regime's more radical programmes, combined with economic hardship, conspired to delegitimate the revolutionary order that those peasants had supported. Evidence suggests that although flight was an option for the more able individuals (failure was certain death), it became increasingly difficult to undertake. Fighting back was seldom an option. Long-practiced peasant strategies of avoidance, dissimulation, and ‘stubborn and sporadic acts of petty resistance’ (see Scott, Reference Scott1985) were observed, but wilful and mass noncompliance also occurred. Examples are recorded of Western Zone cadres fighting and fleeing to Thailand and, as noted, of resistance of Cham villagers who killed CPK cadres. Vickery (Reference Vickery1984) reported a peasant revolt in the district of Chikreng in 1977 provoked by the introduction of communal meals and the separation of families that resulted in the death of 8,000–10,000 peasants in the subsequent suppression. Resistance to the intrusive and radical restructuring of peasant life began to shape DK's response to the worsening conditions in the countryside.Footnote 21
A new phase of murderous activity emerged as CPK leaders shifted their focus from war communism and non-Khmer ‘cleansing’ to agrarian collectivisation and irrigation projects, which in turn required the relocation and reclassification of peasant classes; for example, the definition of ‘full rights people’ gradually narrowed. The inevitable failures to achieve the impossible production quotas imposed on the populace were blamed on internal enemies among the masses as well as the party (Jackson, Reference Jackson and Jackson1989; Kiernan, Reference Kiernan2008; Quinn, Reference Quinn and Jackson1989). The urgency of party purification and purges of ‘soft’ cadres became a constant, while the enforcement of communal discipline and work quotas from 1977 onwards required frequent resort to mass terror. From 1978 there was the constant fear of Vietnamese military activity and intentions, addressed by increasingly irrational military provocations of their powerful former ally. These murderous phases varied in intensity and duration depending on the locality or zone, the relative scarcity of food, especially in 1977, and the interpretation by the local CPK and RAK leaders of the orders from the Centre. The evidence points to an increase in the frequency of murders of all not classified as full rights people in localities where food was scarce and where purges of less zealous cadres had occurred. Thus 1977–8 may have been the peak period for lethal violence following a relatively short respite after the initial mass murders of those connected with the Lon Nol regime and others who had been deemed expendable.
The fall of Democratic Kampuchea
Despite its apparent dominance over the means of violence, in April 1976 the new state experienced attempts to overthrow the DK and CPK leadership. This set the stage for the perpetual purges that accompanied increasing centralisation and ultimately another round of deportations and mass murders in the wake of the rebellion in the Eastern Zone in 1978,Footnote 22 prelude to the invasion by Vietnam. Pol Pot's solution to the inevitable ‘contradictions’Footnote 23 that arose was to crush them with violence, and so in September 1977 he renewed the elimination of the old society because of the continued differences (contradictions) between the peasants and the old urban rulers. The party would then be purged of its revisionist, rightist, and internal rivals. The broad sequence of Central CPK ‘screening’ of cadres began with the Western Zone in March 1977 and continued with the Northeast Zone in September 1977, the Eastern and Northeast Zones in June 1978, and the Northern Zone in August 1978.
By early 1978, supported by the Vietnamese, an incipient ‘people's war’ against the ‘Pol Pot–Ieng Sary Clique’ was developing among a growing number of disaffected cadres in the Eastern Zone (Kiernan, Reference Kiernan2008; Quinn, Reference Quinn and Jackson1989). A failed second coup d’état in mid 1978 was the likely proximate cause of a second purge of the party and mass deportations of Eastern Zone old or former base people. This was the most significant challenge to the CPK thus far and was notable for the scale of defections. Thereafter, the RAK and masses were placed on a full war footing, relying on substantial war materiel from China. During the latter half of 1978, the Centre turned its attention to the further purification of the CPK and the conflict with the rebellious Eastern Zone. An all-pervasive fear of the hated external enemy made the war with Vietnam inevitable. Territorial clashes had occurred immediately in 1975 after ‘liberation’ (the consequence of the decision to reinforce the borders, especially in the east facing Vietnam). Skirmishes between KR and Vietnamese forces had occurred during the civil war, and these continued in the southwestern and eastern border areas throughout 1976 and 1977 but were contained as both sides exercised some restraint over border claims. However, large-scale incursions by the RAK in late 1977 heightened border tension. The mass atrocities that accompanied these border attacks by the RAK were notable for their brutality and included the massacre of entire villages inside Vietnam. The tit-for-tat response to these attacks by the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), in the hope of forcing negotiations, failed but heightened the war tensions and the already visceral anti-Vietnamese stance of the Centre.Footnote 24
The Eastern Zone, with its ‘contaminated’ population, was soon perceived by Pol Pot as a ‘nest of traitors’ and deported after the apparent second coup. The regime's fragility manifested in an extreme purge of the Eastern Zone, and the forced relocations of thousands of peasants pushed many to seek refuge in Vietnam from mid 1978 onwards. As rebel cadres and the communes they controlled were attacked by their zealous enemies from the party Centre and Southwest Zone, they crossed the border en masse; Hun Sen, the future prime minister, had been among the first to defect in June 1977. The suicide in June 1978 of So Phim, first vice president of DK and leading member of the CPK Standing Committee of the Central Committee and Eastern Zone secretary, and the defection of his deputy Heng Samrin to Vietnam brought to an end the old and fragile alliances between moderates, pragmatists, and revolutionaries.Footnote 25 As a result of this turmoil and the perennially imagined external threat, now regarded as imminent, violence against the masses in other zones somewhat abated, in part to prepare the population for the pending conflict with Vietnam.
Revolutionary terror: transforming state and society through authorised crime
The form and revolutionary purpose of the new state of Democratic Kampuchea help account for the nature and targets of its lethal violence. However, the type or character of the CPK-led revolutionary movement has eluded easy classification: was it primarily a peasant rebellion, vulgar Marxist-Leninist or Bolshevik dictatorship, a Khmer adaptation of Maoism, an extreme and fascistic form of ethnonationalism, or indeed a unique hybrid of all these elements? Quinn (Reference Quinn and Jackson1989) and Jackson (Reference Jackson and Jackson1989) describe the close ties between DK leaders and Mao's China and the frequent approving references by Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, and Khieu Samphan of the Cultural Revolution and the collectivisation of the Great Leap Forward. Not easily reduced to a basic core, the regime manifested as an amalgam of radical Maoist-inspired ideology, nationalism, racism, archaism, and millenarianism, grafted on a premodern (preliterate) society whose rural manners and sentiments (Elias, 1939/Reference Elias, Jephcott, Mennell, Dunning, Goudsblom and Kilminster2012; Shelley, Reference Shelley1981) made it vulnerable to more extreme expressions of violence that were seldom ‘simply’ strategic and instrumental.
We have noted in earlier chapters an undercurrent of millenarianism in previous periods of rebellion and banditry in rural Cambodia that was often associated with extreme acts of collective brutality. Such acts when undertaken on the scale of the civil war and revolutionary terror share some of the characteristics of ‘subaltern genocide’ when the ‘oppressed and disempowered adopt genocidal strategies to vanquish their oppressors’ (Robins & Jones, Reference Robins and Jones2009, p. 3). In these mass or megacrimes, the harnessing of the state apparatus for violence is not essential; rather, a humiliated and dominated group (as in the case of the rural Cambodian ‘black’ peasants) overcomes its previous masters and dominators (the rich and ‘white’ city dwellers) and proceeds to turn the tables, invert the normal social relations of class and social superiority (Chandler, Reference Chandler1999, Reference Chandler2008).Footnote 26 The circumstances prevailing at the close of the civil war with massive US air bombardments of the Cambodian countryside helped create a ‘potent ideology of class revenge’ against the Lon Nol regime and the city dwellers who had escaped from the terror of the war raging in the countryside (Robins & Jones, Reference Robins and Jones2009, p. 5).
The leaders of the CPK and DK, the Pol Pot faction, departed from the practices of the Vietnamese communists, who did not abolish markets, education, and currency or push for radical collectivisation and communalism. The orthodox Marxist-Leninist class struggle against capitalism and the owners of the means of production was broadened to encompass all city dwellers inclusive of the urban working class and reified the poorest peasants as model ‘workers’. The pursuit of ethno-Khmer purity added a racial and nationalistic motive that was contrary to the usual strictures of international communism. However, like other ideological fanatics, they chose the Bolshevik ‘blood and soil’ route to socialism and communism (Kiernan, Reference Kiernan2007). And, like Stalin and Mao, they were prepared to sacrifice the people to ‘leap forward’ and forge a new utopia – a hypercultural revolution. Yet, it was not an espoused retreat from modernity but a leap towards it. As Jackson (Reference Jackson and Jackson1989) observed:
The Khmer Rouge sought not to turn back the pages of time to an earlier era of Khmer greatness but to rush forward at a dizzying pace regardless of the consequences. By combining the idealism and heroic virtue extolled by Maoism with a Fanonist or Stalinist reliance on wholesale terror, the Khmer Rouge sought to stimulate the Khmer people to participate in a forced march toward a vision of communist modernity.
They envisaged a state that would rapidly outperform China and North Korea in both revolutionary ardour and modern industrial achievements. The revolutionary song Long Live 17th of April, urging elimination of enemies, and the national anthem (Glorious Seventeenth of April) reifying blood sacrifice as the means of surpassing the brilliance of Angkor, captured these ambitions, while the constitution, albeit a façade of legalism, set the tone for the formation of an ideal peasant worker state.
Who was responsible for directing the military personnel to carry out murders and whether DK's policies were ‘genocidal’ in respect to the mass murder of Cham, Vietnamese, and other non-Khmer groups are still the subjects of legal interest and debate. Our proposition, drawn from the literature, is that the scale of mass murder occurred because of the deliberate policies of Angkar and the goals of the principal leaders of the CPK. Further, the failure to provide food security for the new collectives, the work brigades, and other mass mobilisations and deportations constituted the crime of denying the necessities of life and greatly aggravated the death toll. The evidence prepared by the CDC, including the telling records of S-21 and other survivors’ accounts, shows that DK and its leaders advocated policies of genocide against minorities but also and independently of their ethnic or religious background authorised summary executions of whole classes of ‘enemies’ people, deviants to the new order, and people relegated to the lowest castes of the revolutionary order.
For DK, the ends perfectly justified the means: communism could not be achieved unless the lessons of the Russian and Chinese revolutions were learned – ruthless use of the available human capital and elimination of all opposition. Many perpetrators claimed that they acted from fear of Angkar and had no choice but to murder the so-called enemies of the revolution. The defence of duress (kill or be killed), which may diminish culpability among many low-ranked cadres, is somewhat more compelling than the so-called Nuremberg defence of ‘acting on orders’. Here, disentangling the effects of brutalisation, the capacity to exercise volition, and the habits of obedience to authority is relevant. The broader evidence is that many functionaries of the CPK were indeed believers in the use of violence to purify and renew Cambodia. For the CPK upper echelon, the application of murder was a matter of policy, and for the most part they avoided having blood literally on their hands. The frequent recourse to excessive violence and the presence of cruelties by brutalised shock troops suggest that the disintegrative process designed to break the old society unleashed anomie and a return to archaism, in short a deep decivilising epoch. This aspect of organised serial mass murder, especially when authorised by the state, poses special moral and legal problems for the assignment of culpability but is nevertheless without recourse to pathology, understandable in criminological terms. This is the focus of the next section; from a criminological perspective, what can we say about DK that has not already been said?
DK's revolutionary terror and criminological perspectives
Beyond recounting and describing the unprecedented wave of violence that engulfed Cambodia during the short reign of the KR, this chapter seeks to make sense of the mass murders that accompanied the creation and fall of DK as part of our longer picture of the descending cascades of violence that have been observed in the previous chapters. The relatively short-lived surge in mass violence that occurred during DK appears exceptional and extreme, but not unprecedented. In this section, we apply the theoretical and empirical tools of criminology to account for the scale and forms of mass violence. Before doing so, we discuss the problem of definitions and the limitations of criminological theory.
Megacrime and the limitations of criminological theory
Macrotheoretical approaches that explain conflict and social change are helpful but poorly account for divergent levels and types of violence across time and place. We eschew legalistic definitions and look beyond the legal and normative template of the international crime of genocide. Hinton (Reference Hinton2012) redefined genocide broadly to focus on process and context that capture its variety as ‘the more or less coordinated attempt to destroy a dehumanized and excluded group because of who they are’ (p. 10). Among the many terms employed to define different forms of mass violence, we find politicide, the murder of adherents of a particular ideological position or political class; democide, state mass murders of any civilian grouping and captured soldiers; genocide; megacrime; mass murder; mass violence; and crime against humanity. The variety of terms, all applicable to the Cambodian situation, suggests an overlapping and unsettled field of inquiry to account for the variety of victims and serial nature of many mass murder events. Leman-Langlois (Reference Leman-Langlois2006) reviewed a number of criminological theories in relation to megacrime and refrained from making the object of his study dependent on definitions found in international criminal law.Footnote 27 A nonlegalistic approach widens the object to include mass murders other than state-sponsored planned events (such as the Holocaust) and invites a fuller examination of the field of genocide (Tanner, Reference Tanner2006). So far, criminology has not contributed significantly to our understanding of mass violence and this is because of the limited reach of conventional criminology. ‘Hence, notions of war-crime, crime against humanity and crime against peace…and of State crime, in general are ignored’ (Leman-Langlois, Reference Leman-Langlois2006, p. 23). Thus, despite criminology's voluminous studies of violence and homicide, the problem of ‘authorised crime’, genocide, and mass violence remains largely unexplored.
We argue that understanding megacrime in the context of DK poses special challenges for the explanatory frameworks of traditional criminology. For Leman-Langlois (Reference Leman-Langlois2006), criminology is incapable of explaining megacrimes not because these acts are outside of its field of study but because the explanation is ‘rather to be found in its narrow persistent focus on purely individual conduct’ (p. 23; see also Cohen, Reference Cohen1993; Hagan & Rymond-Richmond, Reference Hagan and Rymond-Richmond2009; Hagan, Rymond-Richmond, & Parker, Reference Hagan, Rymond-Richmond and Parker2005; Liwerant, Reference Liwerant2007; Loyle, Reference Loyle2009; Rhodes, Reference Rhodes2002). Others, such as Winton (Reference Winton2011) and Rhodes (Reference Rhodes2002), have made similar observations but applied microlevel and cultural explanations to address the question of why perpetrators participate in megacrimes. For example, Winton's (Reference Winton2011) adaptation of Athens's (Reference Athens1992) ‘process of violentization’ is essentially a microlevel explanation of individual pathways to extreme violence scaled up to address collective violence and crimes against humanity. The adaptation draws on the perspective of symbolic interactionism by using Athens's map of the psychic processes that create and release actors capable of extreme violence (see below).
Another challenge for criminology in developing a coherent theoretical approach to mass violence is the classical conception of the state (Dumont, Reference Dumont2006). Dumont argued that the idea of the state carries the contradiction of the state as both protector and perpetrator. The state successfully monopolises the means of violence to end the ‘war of all against all’, but this is combined with the politically potent notion that the state is the ultimate legitimate force (of last resort) and that ‘reasons of State’ justify all forms of mass violence whether occurring internally or in respect to other states. For criminologists wedded to the notion that the state strives for constant improvement in crime reduction and control, the paradox of a criminal state, or a state captured by criminals, renders conventional criminology based on social contract theory irrelevant; only macroconflict theories are then available and, as noted, these have little to say about the relationships between the individual and the ‘criminal state’. Liwerant (Reference Liwerant2012, p. 11) argued that this crucial limitation (the legitimacy of the state based on social contract) in the sociopolitical settings usually envisaged by conventional criminology is also bounded by the normative discourses of international human rights and penal justice, which assume a privileged place in the social reaction to mass murder and its excessive horror. In short, moral repugnancy also reveals our ‘lack of interpretative tools for such violence, including criminological ones’. Outrage replaces analysis.
Despite these constraints we see criminological studies as an untapped reservoir of empirical knowledge about violence yet to be applied fully to the question of the nature and form of megacrimes, including genocide. Hagan et al. (Reference Hagan, Rymond-Richmond and Parker2005) asserted that: ‘modern criminology possesses the theory and methods to document, describe, analyse, and explain “the crime of crimes” and other important violations of international criminal law. The denial and neglect of these crimes in modern criminology itself needs explanation’ (p. 556). While neglect of the topic of megacrimes in criminology can be related to the limitations of existing research and theories, we would argue that ‘political’ topics have also been outside of the preoccupations of mainstream criminology, dominated by concerns about the reform of individuals and domestic criminal justice systems. Yet reengagement with the political in crime, especially the integration of both individual and collective violent behaviour, could offer a source for the renewal of criminology's traditional paradigms (Liwerant, Reference Liwerant2012). For Liwerant (Reference Liwerant2012, p. 22) ‘murderous normativity’ appears in these megacrimes as a mode of political management such that traditional criminologists no longer see grave breaches of norms but the construction of a new (dominant) normative worldview; therefore, the transformation of the transgression of murder into an institution requires the construction of new interpretative tools (Liwerant, Reference Liwerant2012, pp. 12–13). The poverty of interpretative tools, including those offered by criminology, suggests a deep ambivalence towards violence and its meaning, especially given our near universal taboo against extreme cruelty and our repugnancy towards perpetrators. This ambiguity is apparent in the normalised behaviour of executioners and in the consequential but privileged juridical discussion of these crimes rather than a focus on the warlike behaviour that creates the conditions for barbarity (Liwerant, Reference Liwerant2012).
Criminological explanations of megacrime
Can megacrime be interpreted using traditional crime theories such as strain, differential association, social control, and techniques of neutralisation? We draw on the work of Hélène Dumont (Reference Hughes2006) and Stéphane Leman-Langlois (Reference Leman-Langlois2006), who discussed the applicability of these theories and explored their limits in the case of mass violence and genocide. Dumont (Reference Dumont2006) introduced a special issue of the journal Criminologie on genocide and remarked, ‘The study of genocides causes paradigmatic breaks and raises epistemological difficulties to these fields of study [criminology, law, philosophy] which have to revise their classic modes of thinking’ (p. 3).
In the same issue, Leman-Langlois (Reference Leman-Langlois2006) examined the reality of the recent genocides in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda using three criminological approaches (rational choice, differential association, and techniques of neutralisation) for conceptualising individual, organised, and collective criminality. He suggested that criminological theories are not yet capable of providing an analytical framework to understand the crime of genocide. Using a similar approach, we now examine whether and in which way a range of criminological theories can help us understand and account for the megaviolence under DK. But first it is necessary to have a critical look at the notion that megacrimes generally rely on a strict pyramidal structure of authority where the goals and orders of all-powerful deciders are blindly executed by an army of overobedient executioners. This notion is often based on simplified accounts of both the Holocaust and the structure of organised crime.
Dumont (Reference Dumont2006) noted that Holocaust studies have ‘highlighted the authoritarian and organised structure of the genocidal operation and, in a similar way, studies of organised crime take into account the pyramidal structure of authority and the authoritarian culture to explain the scale of the criminal activities of many participants’ (p. 5). Yet, she warned against generalising from these studies as they may ‘tend to categorically separate the participants in a genocide between rational order-givers on the one hand and obedient, constrained, or strongly manipulated and irrational perpetrators on the other hand’ (p. 5). Other limitations are apparent with any analogy to organised crime, especially given the role of loose macrocriminal networks in the morphology of organised crime. Our review of the phases and patterns of the Cambodian hemoclysm and the following theoretical perspectives show the limitations of a conventional top-down analysis of megacrimes.
Rational choice
Leman-Langlois concluded that the opportunistic economic calculus of maximising gain for hedonistic actors envisaged by rational choice (or classical deterrence theory) cannot ‘account for the scale of the criminal massacres, the number of participants in a genocide and the motivation behind genocidal actions’. It is not that individual opportunistic motivations for power and gain are absent in megacrimes of any form (genocides, mass terror, civil wars, and the like) but that ‘where he 1) chooses certain actions, 2) with a goal in mind, and 3) within a context, the perpetrator of mega-crime is rational per definition. However, this helps little to understand what and how he is thinking and even less why he chooses certain means rather than others’ (Leman-Langlois, Reference Leman-Langlois2006, p. 27). At best it fits with the observed evidence that both organisers and perpetrators of megacrimes are rational (i.e. not affected by pathology), and it shows that they are not rigorously split between rational authorisers on one side and perpetrating automatons on the other side. The problem with rational choice is that it ‘explains’ so much that it ends up explaining little. Unless profoundly brain damaged, all individuals choose to escape pain and seek pleasure (as they experience it). Fear and duress (kill or be killed) can then be framed into a rational choice, albeit one bounded by the circumstances found by the actor. However, rationality is also bounded or limited (i.e. dependent on the knowledge, content, skills, and actual resources brought to play), especially if exercised via a closed or fixed set of ideas or ideologies. With these limitations in mind, we look to social psychological perspectives, which suggest interactions between actors at the ‘top and bottom’ are critical in the implementation of mass violence.
Differential association and neutralisation
Leman-Langlois found in the general criminological theories of ‘differential association’ (e.g. Akers, Reference Akers2009) and ‘techniques of neutralisation’ (Sykes & Matza, Reference Sykes and Matza1957) a more helpful approach for addressing group or collective crime. This is because differential association theories propose that individuals learn to see reality in accordance with the collective ideology of the dominant group, and they apply techniques of neutralisation, which are not post hoc justifications or excuses but authorised departures from the customary prohibitions. The ‘techniques’ formulated by Matza and Sykes were originally postulated to explain illicit acts by juveniles that were undertaken despite the juveniles’ recognition and endorsement of general social and moral codes of conduct. These techniques are instrumental in forming the belief system of the individual as well as the group or collective. Deviance, however, does not require the creation of new moral codes of conduct; rather, offenders can ‘drift’ between a deviant and a legitimate lifestyle as circumstances require and justify their deviant actions by using these techniques of neutralisation (Matza, Reference Matza1964). Five techniques were identified: denial of responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners, and appeal to higher loyalties. These techniques allow violent actors to perceive their collective criminal acts as dissociated from the general morality of society.
Participation in actions previously judged immoral requires that the actor be situated in a relatively particular system of beliefs, and above all beliefs that favour obedience to orders and general deference to authority. The formation of this belief is far more effective in the closed environment of a totalitarian bureaucracy, relatively isolated from the outside world. It is the same socio-psychological dynamic that spreads in extremist sects…In a nutshell the authorised crime is the result of power games within a group where a culture of neutralisation of certain acts commonly considered as crimes (immoral and punished) by the members has established itself.
In the learning processes that lead to the preemptive use of violence, effective efforts to reduce the humanity and worthiness of the victim in the mind of the perpetrator are paramount. Thus the use of techniques such as the denial and blaming of the victim, constructed as ‘enemy’, and the appeal to the moral force of socialism, communism, fascism, or any other higher fealties can be both preparatory and consistent with a new and more persuasive morality. Techniques of neutralisation draw together micro-individual processes that help provide grounds or justifications for violent action but that arise from an interactive process between the individual and the salient groups and associations that enmesh the actor; in short, groups that are predisposed towards violence create a climate for its use and compel the individual to use violence as a prerequisite for joining and participating in the group. In the Cambodian situation, all five techniques are relevant, but ‘denial of responsibility’ may apply both as an enabler and post hoc rationalisation. The frequent use of dehumanising language about enemies of DK shows the utility of ‘denial of the victim’, while the barbarity of the enemy, especially the USA and Lon Nol republicans, offered a compelling opportunity for ‘condemning the condemners’ (i.e. the condemners were just as bad). ‘Appeal to higher loyalties’ such as the revolution, patriotism, or one's ‘race’ is common to many persistent acts of violence (Sykes & Matza, Reference Sykes and Matza1957). ‘Denial of injury’ is the least useful, particularly for frontline soldiers, but often used by the authorisers to deny the extent of injury caused.Footnote 28
Anomie and strain
‘Anomie’, a state of uncertainty, anxiety, and disengagement, which arises when the ‘rules of the game’ undergo abrupt change, for instance, when social norms and customary hierarchies of age and class invert as in DK, often leads to normlessness or drift among individuals and groups (Durkheim, 1893/Reference Durkheim1964; Merton, 1938/Reference Merton1949). Anomie offers a midrange theory that accounts for the impact of sudden transition and change and the strain or tension that arises when traditional – or in the DK case newly minted social goals – norms and values clash with the means available to realise them. This tension produces individual or collective adaptations that include deviance, rebellion, retreatism, ritualism, and conformity (Merton, 1938/Reference Merton1949). The DK period was certainly a period of rapid social change when not only the monarchy, village life, and religion were abolished but also the names of ancient provinces were renamed ‘zones’ and a new language (reminiscent of Orwell's newspeak) was also invented (Hinton, Reference Hinton1998, Reference Hinton and Hinton2002; Picq, Reference Picq1989). It was duly amplified by revolutionary zeal and the radical reorientation of the (‘archaic’) individual to new collective socialist norms. Anomie thus arose from the disruption and disintegration of relations between individuals and familial groups, villages/neighbourhoods, the wider society, and the state and from the uncertainties and ambiguities that occur when the social order (power centres) disintegrates and re-forms. Given that terror was the main tool of DK to change the rules of the game, ritualism may have been the only adaptation available: most knew the goals were unattainable, but hyperconformity to the required social behaviour could ensure survival.
The social psychology of violence
A few celebrated laboratory studies that appear to show shallow inhibitions of human capacities for violence have been widely quoted in the genocide literature as compelling illustrations of how ordinary people may do ‘evil’. These studies from the ‘golden age of social psychology’ showed that ‘people take their cues on how to behave from other people’ (Pinker, Reference Pinker2011, p. 558). They also attempted to unlock the sort of circumstances that would allow ‘group think’ to flourish. Two such studies have been highly influential: one focused on the prison or custodial environment and the other probed how an authoritative setting would test the ‘obedience’ of subjects in administering pain to others when ordered to by an experimental researcher. Given the research ethics standards of today, these experiments cannot be fully replicated and thus give grounds for scepticism regarding the ‘conditions’ and generalisation to real-world situations. For Pinker, the overall findings of laboratory studies of this type showed that ‘a majority of people will still hurt a stranger against their own inclinations if they see it as part of a legitimate project in their society’ (Pinker, Reference Pinker2011, p. 560).
The prison simulation at Stanford University created a basic custodial environment populated by naive subjects randomly assigned to roles of guards or prisoners. Within 6 days, violence between guards and inmates had become so frequent and the trauma of the inmates so serious that the experiment was ended. The researchers, Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo (Reference Haney, Banks and Zimbardo1973), concluded that the environment and structural conditions of prisons generated the violence rather than the disposition or personalities of the experiment's participants. A lesser-known replication of the Stanford prison simulation by Lovibond and colleagues at the University of New South Wales introduced three conditions: the first was a replication of the Stanford experiment; in the second ‘individualised’ condition, guards were given instructions to follow the rules of conduct of the New South Wales Corrective Service; the third was a ‘participatory’ condition, which encouraged a consultative approach and fostered constructive and responsible behaviour. While the strict replication produced similar results to the original experiment, the ‘individualised’ and ‘participatory’ versions were substantially less traumatic and violent than the crude simulation at Stanford. The researchers also concluded that the results provided support for ‘further evidence that hostile affrontive relations in prison are a function of the social organization of prison rather than the personal characteristics of the participants’ (Lovibond, Mithiran, & Adams, Reference Lovibond, Mithiran and Adams1979, p. 273).
In the well-known laboratory studies of obedience conducted by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, naive subjects were paid an hourly fee to act as ‘teachers’ and were compelled by a supervising scientist to administer (fake) electric shocks to ‘learners’ in an experiment designed to test compliance to authority but disguised as studying the impact of punishment on learning (Milgram, Reference Milgram1963, Reference Milgram1974). Two thirds of the subjects (65 per cent) administered the maximum voltage (a supposedly near fatal 450 volts) to the ‘learners’, who were usually out of sight in another room and who carefully faked distress and pain. Greater proximity to victims and the physical absence of the supervising scientist weakened compliance to the orders to continue the experiment. Milgram was surprised by the willingness of his subjects to respond to the stern commands of an authoritative source; although not entirely able to shake off the possibility that his very willing subjects sensed the experiment was a hoax, he nevertheless concluded,
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
The Milgram studies were partially replicated – at least to the initial 150 volts shock threshold – by Burger (Reference Burger2009) 40 years later, and Burger predicted that many of his subjects would be likely to proceed to higher levels of harm, hence confirming the nexus between a compelling authority and the performance of otherwise taboo conduct, such as hurting another under the compulsion of a command. Yet, a larger proportion of Burger's subjects declined to obey the experimenter than had those who participated in Milgram's studies (about 30 per cent compared to 17.5 per cent). While these studies are indicative of the influence of authority on obedience, they are nevertheless limited by the experimental conditions, particularly the context of a scientific experiment administered by an institution of repute, which claimed that the subjects were not harmed.Footnote 29 The legitimacy of the authority ordering the violence is thus highly relevant. Shifting the context to a real event of torture or killing requires a different order of compliance and circumstances where a ‘legitimate’ ideology and government authorise such extremes. Obedience in the context of a totalitarian regime, as Pinker (Reference Pinker2011) noted, depends on ‘pluralistic ignorance’ that requires individuals ‘to cultivate thoroughgoing thought control lest their true feelings betray them’ (p. 562). Their sincerity must be demonstrated, and techniques of neutralisation (in Pinker's terms, euphemisms, gradualism, displacement and diffusion of responsibility, distancing from and derogation of the victim) allow the ‘moralisation gap’ or cognitive dissonance to be moderated and help manage the inherent stress of breaking taboos. In the Cambodian setting under the DK regime, the transformation of society through organised violence provided an extreme ideological authorising condition, one where terror was employed and participation in such terror demonstrated loyalty. Deliberate techniques of brutalisation of the torturers undermined moderators such as empathy, and the fear wrought by terror (kill or be killed) subdued potential acts of collective disobedience.
Violentisation
Winton (Reference Winton2011) adapted Athens's (Reference Athens1992) individual microlevel ‘process of violentization’ to the crime of genocide in an attempt to integrate individual pathways to excessive violence with collective manifestations of extreme violence. Athens's original theory described four stages of the process of violentisation: during the first brutalisation stage,Footnote 30 individuals are taught how to engage in violence; the defiance stage provides a belief system supportive of the use of violence; in the third stage, the violent dominance engagements stage, individuals engage in acts of violence – they may be punished for failing to do so and rewarded for successfully becoming violent; ultimately, in the final virulency stage, individuals adopt a violent and dangerous self. Winton added the final stage of extreme virulency to account for the capacity of brutalised groups to perform extreme violence such as torture. In the process, the brutalised subjects become incapable of empathy. The process of brutalisation and desensitisation applied to Angkar's Revolutionary Army (RAK) was achieved through the habits of war, but it was more fully realised by the conscription of boy (and some girl) soldiers (chlomb/chlorbs). These very young peasant recruits were trained as shock troops who together went through the violentisation process of priming for the murder of class enemies, often practising on animals various methods of killing (Quinn, Reference Quinn and Jackson1989, pp. 237–9, citing Sihanouk, Reference Sihanouk1980, and others). The result was an obedient shock force indoctrinated by Bolshevised reeducators and led by warlords.
The phenomenological process of ‘violentisation’ is underpinned by demonstration and imitation by significant others who hold the idea of the generalised violent ‘other’ (cf. Becker, Reference Becker1963). Athens developed the idea of the generalised ‘other’ to the broader notion of a ‘phantom other’ or ‘phantom community’, which allows the offenders to legitimate their violence and reflects the essential fluidity of the self, similar to the notion of drift (Winton, Reference Winton2011, p. 366). In short, an imagined other or community serves to mobilise an oppositional posture that also enables neutralisation to take place. The RAK was the incubator for the conversion of peasant boys to revolutionary instruments and murderers through the suppression of dehumanised (phantom others) class enemies. In the final stage of ‘virulency’, the actor aware of his notoriety becomes ‘overly impressed with his violent performances and ultimately with himself in general’ (Athens, Reference Athens1992, p. 75). Winton's additional stage of ‘extreme virulency’ carries the same risks of overconfidence due to the unrestrained performance of previously taboo behaviour such that perpetrators may feel they transcend the normal; a new state of being arises – indeed, a new persona emerges, and in Cambodia, by extension, a new society.Footnote 31 The creation of an army of actors capable of breaking all taboos and customary sociability required such a violentisation process. This training in violence was undertaken via the educative zeal of the vanguard, the party zealots and former teachers who formed the leadership of Ankgar and the CPK. Violentisation processes were aided by the dominance of radical preferences for violence in the resolution of conflict and ‘contradictions’, the archaic preliterate communal nature of Cambodian society, the legacy of absolutism, and the transcendental fatalism of Buddhism that rendered violentisation possible once impressionable youths were separated from the customary social order and traditional hierarchies.
Disproportionate revenge
According to Hinton (Reference Hinton1998, Reference Hinton and Hinton2002), cultural traditions in Cambodia require that bad deeds, like good deeds, must be repaid, and the obligation to do so links or ties the parties concerned; thus, ‘revenge is the inverse of gratitude’. He further referred to the Cambodian cultural trope of disproportionate revenge (‘a head for an eye’), or kum, which, in his view, provided a context for the excess of violence by shock troops and their leaders. Hinton argued that the epic poem Tum Teav illustrates the resort to excessive violence that forms this cultural trait. It tells the story of the thwarted love of two sweethearts and the awful revenge of decapitation by plow and harrow visited by King Rama on the family and seven generations removed of the Governor Archoun, whose conduct caused the death of the two lovers. For Hinton (Reference Hinton1998), the disproportionate use of violence during DK was in part the result of these ‘salient cultural models’ (p. 353). Recruits to the CPK and RAK learned the anger needed to ‘smash’ the rich capitalist class and transform Cambodia, the underlying notion being that violence must be paid back and be used perforce to suppress rather than resolve conflict. The build-up of grudges based on class resentment proved ‘lethal during the DK when Khmer Rouge ideology encouraged the poor to take revenge upon the rich for past abuse’ and ‘provided a legitimizing and highly motivating basis for much violence during DK’ (Hinton, Reference Hinton1998, pp. 356, 360). The cultivation of hate and the dehumanisation of class enemies descended on city dwellers, who once were the dominating and superior rich but who were reduced to the inferior status of ‘new people’.
In an intensely hierarchical social order, honour may be fragile, and frequently tested loss of face and perceived slights can only be resolved by payback, which reasserts face. Homicide studies refer to such violent contests, often lethal once commenced and usually between males, as honour contests.Footnote 32 These cycles of payback ultimately end only with the destruction of the entire familial line of the challenger. The killing of all those associated with the Lon Nol regime, class enemies, and disloyal cadres, including their families and children – the so-called strings of association and patronage that included subordinates – was an example of such spirals of revenge. This was a reversion to the ancient penal codes of collective and clan punishment that had been practiced in the precolonial era and in premodern times elsewhere. Ponchaud's (Reference Ponchaud and Jackson1989) observations that this form of archaism was not out of place in DK predated Hinton's and drew on the same cultural tropes:
They therefore did not hesitate, in certain sectors, to execute the wives and children of the condemned, especially those of former officers in 1975, and even those of Khmer Rouge cadres after 1977. In fact it was ‘the application in attenuated form of the 1877 Cambodian penal code which stipulated that sudden death could be meted out to the entire family of the culprit as well’…The novel Tum Teav…echoes a certain tradition as concerns forms of punishment: the relatives ‘to the seventh degree’ of the culprits were buried alive, their heads raked off with an iron harrow.
However, we do not subscribe entirely to Hinton's ethnocultural explanation. Durkheim, Elias, and others have argued, and we shall ourselves contend later on, that disproportionate revenge and associated affective and cognitive processes have been observed almost everywhere in the history of humanity and are more likely associated with sociogenetic and psychogenetic development than any particular ethnic culture.
Criminology and megacrime
Traditional criminological theories can be applied to account for the crimes committed during DK, but they fail to fully explain the varied forms and apocalyptic levels of the violence. Yet, phenomenological approaches, based on the idea that ‘crime’ is socially constructed and what constitutes crime and who are regarded as deviants are essentially learned through a process of domination and social construction (including neutralisations), remain relevant and potent.Footnote 33 These theories are pertinent to show how repeated and powerful exposure to hostility towards those ‘others’ deemed outsiders, that is, warlike conduct and violentisation, tie individual and collective learned dispositions to violence with events of mass violence authorised by the state. The scale of the violence suggests a new phylum or division in the ‘kingdom’ of violence, and criminological theory offers assistance in understanding how extreme violence unfolds in circumstances of drastic change.Footnote 34 While extreme forms of violence occur in all societies, they are generally rare. Here we are thinking of occasional, brutal, often expressive murders that are often associated with the pathology of the offender and involve the extreme violation of deeply held taboos such as the murder of children, sexual murders, and the torture and postmortem mutilation of victims. The repugnancy of these events is such that social outrage appears universal and the response of the state swift and substantial.
These extraordinary crimes thus have the function of reaffirming social solidarity and social values (cf. Durkheim) and allow the state to assert moral legitimacy. In a situation where the scale of extraordinary murder is prevalent and unchecked – indeed, authorised, as in DK – is a new order or division of crime required? In this situation new normative definitions must be considered, and the subject of crime must be redefined. Indeed, theoretical argument about the definition of crime, usually forming around narrower legalistic or broader sociological definitions, is crucial to the project of criminology. The ‘essential crime’ in these extreme megacrimes might be conceived as domination, which is the key element in the struggles within and between hierarchies of dominance and therefore is seen as intractable as long as the exercise of power remains fundamental and unchanging. Anarchist and associated peace-making or constitutive criminology redefine crime broadly as ‘the suppression of the human spirit’ (Tift & Sullivan, Reference Tifft and Sullivan1980) or in republican criminology as ‘an invasion of dominion’ (Braithwaite & Petit, Reference Braithwaite and Pettit1990).
Conclusion: the perfect storm
Applying a macrotheoretical approach based on conflict generally accounts for the dynamics that led to the ‘perfect storm’ of mass violence in Cambodia. The analysis of factors leading to that perfect storm can be understood through a criminological perspective that combines historical, cultural, and situational/proximate factors. The Second Indochina War in tandem with civil war converged with peasant revenge, revolution, and racist nationalism, which in turn coalesced with state policies of economic, political, and cultural autarky and literal social reengineering of state and society. All these factors combined as disintegrating forces of decivilisation, but the scale of violence became magnified by the unique amalgam of Cambodian communism and the impact of Cold War externalities. These broad drivers help contextualise the relevance of criminological theories such as neutralisation and violentisation, which are usually applied to individual-level explanations, and show how their principles can be extended to group and collective violence; in doing so, the types of violence, perpetrators, and victims found in mass violence can be more easily distinguished and analysed.
As far as violence is concerned, 1975 was certainly not ‘year zero’: Cambodian history has exposed many examples of ordinary violence, mass violence, and atrocities. Since the mid 1960s violence had become commonplace, and the revolutionary terror and totalitarian regime of the KR had been established as early as 1970 in certain regions. As Jackson (Reference Jackson and Jackson1989) observed: ‘The fact that massive amounts of blood were shed by the Khmer Rouge diverged from the Khmer norms in scope rather than in kind’ (p. 72). Rummel's (Reference Rummel1994, pp. 4–5) comparative research on megamurders or ‘democides’ placed Cambodia as the highest of all democides that occurred between 1900 and 1987 when measuring the proportion of those who perished as an annual rate of the total population. DK was the most lethal of the twentieth century's most lethal regimes that he compared.Footnote 35 The civil war, combined with the destructiveness of the Vietnamese war of liberation, produced a surfeit of war victims and war psychosis. War terror was etched into everyday existence. As Becker (Reference Becker1986) remarked, the Cambodians had become conditioned to the habits of war.
The Cambodian legacy of unending authoritarianism and, particularly during the French Protectorate, the politics of isolation and infantilisation ensured a political consciousness that was limited by ethnic and nationalist interests. Political organisation of the masses in the years after decolonisation was undeveloped and participation remained very low. The economy, dependent on rice production and only partially linked to regional trade, was vulnerable, while the division of labour and interdependency were not developed, and so the promise of autarkic communism and liberation from the burdens of both the city and money promised enough to mobilise the vanguard, especially the RAK and its young shock troops of poor peasants. The metaphor of the perfect storm describes the rapid convergence of critical conditions that cascade into a decivilising episode. Gerlach (Reference Gerlach2006) stressed: ‘Societies are not extremely violent in principle or by character; rather societies turn extremely violent in what is a temporary process. Under conditions mostly perceived within as a crisis, longer-term negative attitudes and prejudices are radicalised’ (p. 461). The violent pattern of a Bolshevik-like revolution emerged from the civil war, and an amalgam of the Jacobins, Mao and Stalin, Fanon and Samir Amin mixed with indigenous sources offered ideological justifications for violence; they reinforced one another and coalesced to form ‘the main features of modern genocidal ideology that emerged then, from combinations of religious or racial hatred with territorial expansionism and cults of antiquity and agriculture’ (Kiernan, Reference Kiernan2007, p. 3).Footnote 36
The incipient violence that followed the ruthless practice of war communism was seldom restrained or moderated by the Centre. Although attempts were made to curtail the arbitrary murders by local authorities (Kiernan, Reference Kiernan2008; Vickery, Reference Vickery1984), the Centre itself was captured by fear of rebellion and sabotage. Indeed, the vast majority of Cambodians were traditional, undereducated peasants, infantilised and overtaxed by the colonial and postcolonial state, and often exposed to harsh, cruel, and arbitrary punishment. Premodern peasant sensibilities thoroughly brutalised by corrupt and authoritarian rulers and civil war and informed by revolutionary intolerance were fully exercised by permanently generalising the traditional capacities for individualised acts of cruelty, which occasionally rose to periodic collective violence. In this sense they were primed for retaliation in kind.
The ‘moral inversion’ discussed by Chandler (Reference Chandler1999), which played a role through undoing hierarchies of age, status, and religious and social order (but not hierarchies of dominance per se, on the contrary), manifested in the sudden change in the ‘rules of the game’ that accompanied ‘liberation day’ and induced ‘lawlessness’ and normlessness (as in anomie). The most vulnerable to this inversion was the revolutionary vanguard, the young shock troops that formed the bulk of the revolutionary army and became dominant after the purges of the Issarak, the Hanoi Khmer, and the Eastern Zone officer corps. In a process of violentisation reinforced by constant performance of violent acts, these youthful agents of terror came to relish their power, and acts of violence became ‘virulent’. It was as if bandits and murderers now ruled and thoughtlessly implemented grand abstract policies upon a fearful population of slaves – an oriental Sparta in the making. The image of an adolescent KR soldier wielding a pistol during the evacuation of Phnom Penh on the cover of Time in April 1975 illustrated the effectiveness of the civil war on hardening the youthful vanguard capable of conducting the murders made necessary by the revolution.Footnote 37 DK's decivilising practices were the means to achieve the goals of a new socialist Cambodia, free of all vestiges of the old regime.
These young shock troops, often younger than fifteen and from ‘old’ or base villages, implemented the violence and terror necessary to create DK because, as Quinn (Reference Quinn and Jackson1989) explained:
a small group of alienated intellectuals, enraged by their perception of a totally corrupt society and imbued with a Maoist plan to create a pure socialist order in the shortest possible time, recruited extremely young, poor, and envious cadres, instructed them in harsh and brutal methods learnt from Stalinist mentors, and used them to destroy physically the cultural underpinnings of the Khmer civilisation and to impose a new society through purges, executions and violence.
First, former rivals and enemies were eliminated, followed by the suppression and elimination of Vietnamese, students, monks, and teachers. Later, those idle or unproductive, especially among the ‘new people’ (who carried urban, class, and foreign contamination), and those imbued with the old values and all who deviated from the strictures of the new order became lethal targets. For DK, ‘the academic world posed an inherent threat: if it had produced them, it could also produce a new dissident group to overthrow them’. Religious leaders and teachers blinded the masses to their exploitation and the necessity of class struggle and were targeted as an ‘essential part of breaking up the old system’ (Quinn, Reference Quinn and Jackson1989, pp. 188–9). The CPK also set to undermine the family and sequestered the young for ideological training that turned them into active agents against parental authority and the ‘old’ ways. The object of these new communes was to affirm the power of Angkar and to reduce and eventually eliminate individualism. Cambodia was to become a giant agricultural society with each person filing a distinct, specific function. As in Mao's vision, true communism was only realised as collective action (Quinn, Reference Quinn and Jackson1989, p. 193). The radical changes wrought by terror and the new communes were designed to undermine Cambodia's institutions – religion, family, property, monarchy, money, cities, and home villages – all ultimately destroyed, and with this overturn, any customary constraints on violence. The extreme reduction of interdependency through the destruction of relationships that were normally formed via these institutions brutally unleashed the processes of decivilisation.
The CPK was thus aiming to remodel the very inner thoughts and behaviours of its citizens. Reminiscent of Foucault's (Reference Foucault1977) thesis that the microphysics of control in total institutions (such as prisons and asylums) changed when the aim of the rehabilitators or reeducators of the modern prison turned from the discipline or taming of the body to the taming of the mind, DK also sought to rearrange and tame the minds of its captive population. So, with collectivisation, violence, surveillance, and self-abnegation, old individualist values and habits would be eliminated. The Khmer had been reduced to slaves, but they had yet to be transformed into the perfect collective tools of the state. The ultimate goal of the regime's reeducators was a reconfigured ardent and compliant Khmer subject re-created as model worker and peasant so beloved by revolutionary propaganda. The educators themselves, the self-proclaimed ‘society of secular saints’ driven by the Jacobin obsession with purity and unanimity, were filled with an ‘excess of morality’. Armed with the means of the state and primed with ideological justification for extreme violence, they planned first to destroy a corrupt ancient regime and then to rebuild a model communist state by cannibalising the population and exerting absolute control.
Postface
In the final days of December 1978, during a rare brief official visit, the journalists Elizabeth Becker (Washington Post) and Richard Dudman (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), as well as Dr Malcolm Caldwell, a Marxist UK academic (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), interviewed – or rather, were lectured by – Pol Pot. They were allowed an escorted visit outside Phnom Penh to see a model collective. Becker observed a surreal world of confected agrarian bounty, poorly mechanised production brigades, and industries populated by rigid figurants without a single smile – faces of apprehension overseen by young armed soldiers. Before they departed for Beijing on 23 December 1978, Caldwell obtained another meeting with Pol Pot, which apparently went well. Caldwell returned affirmed in his positive support for Pol Pot's vision. Later that night he was killed in their Phnom Penh guesthouse. Awakened by gunshots, Becker was confronted by a pistol-bearing young man, and she fled back into her room. Gunfire erupted and armed men were seen on the street; all was confusion. The minders reappeared and Becker and Dudman were shown the body of Caldwell, who had been shot, along with a young Cambodian man. They left Cambodia no wiser about who killed Caldwell and why. Becker suspected that Caldwell was unlikely to have offended Pol Pot because of his support and sympathy for the CPK's programme, but the motives for his killing and the identity of the real attackers are still unknown.Footnote 38
Four of the visitors’ guards were arrested and, after interrogation at S-21, two confessed that Caldwell was killed to undermine the regime and ‘to prevent the party from gathering friends from around the world’. Another explanation was that Caldwell was killed by a Vietnamese commando unit as part of the essential ‘psych-ops’ that precede a military invasion, a propaganda coup to illustrate the instability and brutality of the Pol Pot clique (Short, Reference Short2004). For Becker (Reference Becker1986) and Osborne (Reference Osborne1994), this ‘murder’ was illustrative of the madness, anarchy, and weakness of the regime as the last days unfolded and the state was unravelling as rapidly as it began.Footnote 39 A recent, more prosaic version reported by both Sikoeun (2013) and Locard (Reference Locard2013) drew on an account by Phi Phuon, who was in charge of security at B1 (DK Foreign Ministry), including the security of those invited by the regime.Footnote 40 In his version, one of the young guards charged with the security of the three foreign guests was in love with a young female revolutionary; this was reciprocal, but, of course, during DK, prohibited. She had rejected the advances of another suitor and, to show her love to the young guard, the girl had given him a krama (a cotton scarf, one of the few personal items permitted). Seeking revenge, the rival denounced the young guard, and, as was common, his arrest for this ‘sexual crime’ happened at night. The young guard, knowing what such an arrest meant for him, defended himself, and in the resulting shooting, Caldwell, rather than hiding like his two friends, went out his bedroom and in the confusion was accidentally killed. The young guard was also killed, intentionally or perhaps in self-defence, by his arresters. This version places the motives of common jealousy in the hands of a thwarted suitor, who, to get revenge, manipulates the system of puritanical terror endorsed by DK. Such an account, as plausible as the others, does not need conspiracy theories to illustrate the madness of the regime. Three days later Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia with ‘overpowering force to wipe out the enemy’.Footnote 41 Hollowed out by impossible ideas and terror and as incompetent as the old corrupt regime it had replaced, Democratic Kampuchea collapsed in 2 weeks.Footnote 42
On 7 January 1979, the People's Army of Vietnam, supported by a small indigenous force led by former Eastern Zone officers under the banner of the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation (KUFNS), occupied a hastily deserted Phnom Penh, and the People's Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) was proclaimed the following day. The PAVN quickly moved to occupy all the major towns and strategic locations.Footnote 43 The remnants of the RAK were scattered to the west and the north, and the CPK leadership survived diminished but still with powerful allies. In their retreat, further forced marches of base people, destruction of granaries, and massacres occurred in an apparent policy of scorched earth (Kiernan, Reference Kiernan2008).
The Cold War politics of the time allowed the remaining DK forces to find refuge in Thailand and to receive the support of China and the USA, which saw in the Khmer Rouge an enemy of Vietnam – a case of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ – despite the shameful atrocities that had occurred. The lifeline offered to the remaining DK forces under Pol Pot enabled an insurgency and civil war to linger for another 20 years, compounding the disaster of the revolution. The leaders returned to the forests and mountains and to the guerrilla tactics they had practised in the past.
Vietnam's invasion and occupation ended DK and was welcomed by many Cambodians. It allowed them to begin to return to a more normal life, no longer subjected to arbitrary punishment or forced to work in collectives. Finally they were able to return to familial rather than communal meals, as they had been compelled by the ambitious form of collectivisation attempted by DK. The Vietnamese intervention may have been required by the realpolitik of the border wars and hegemonic aspirations for Indochina, but it was also fundamentally an act of humanitarian assistance – a costly exercise in what today would be called ‘the responsibility to protect’. The military defeat of DK provoked the Chinese, already then concerned to contain the Vietnamese, into further support of a regime that it yet recognised as deviant from the normal path of communist development. By then, the pragmatists led by Deng Xiaoping had returned to power, ending the Cultural Revolution and left radicalism. In January 1979, the Chinese launched a divisional-scale excursion across the northern borders of Vietnam in response to the invasion of Cambodia but were repulsed, with heavy losses. The Cambodian-Vietnam war was not just another proxy conflict for the Cold War (Regaud, Reference Regaud1992), but it was played out in the context of Russian-Chinese rivalry. The tone was set for the extension of hostilities in Cambodia. The desperate need for reconstruction and the creation of a sustainable form of government was to be delayed by the formation of a new united front against the PRK and the Vietnamese occupation.
